On the week of April Fools, it would be hilarious to see puzzles that are designed such that, instead of being solved the usual way, they have to be solved like a different puzzle.

Here are a few suggestions to illustrate what I'm talking about.

Link-a-Pix solved like a Maze-a-Pix: All of the walls are made out of black Ones (which auto-fill when the option is checked). Drag a red line of fixed length to the end. For extra trickiness, since the link is supposed to be a specific number of tiles long, there can be multiple paths that get you there, but all except one are too short or too long.

Hitori solved like Nurikabe: Blank tiles are represented by Zeroes. Otherwise, the goal is to create islands containing exactly one non-Zero tile, separated by a single contiguous wall.

Skyscrapers solved like Battleships: All the clues are arranged on the bottom and right sides just like Battleships. Ship segments would be represented by Ones, and water by Twos.

Question to Dave: Do you know if it is technically possible for puzzle designers to create puzzles that have solutions which break the rules?

And kind of mean for all those little kids who cut their logic-teeth on the mazes, dots and link-a-pix.

I'm not a fan of April Fools, but if Conceptis wants to go that way, then a single fake, insolvable puzzle might be easier; announce the beta-version of a brand new puzzle requiring testers, sort of thing. Mind you, the joke's only supposed to last till mid-day of April 1st, and I doubt there'd be enough dedicated puzzlers online to make anything worth the effort.

And of course, now that ChaoticBrain has brought up the idea, I think I'll just skip Conceptis that day, just to be on the safe side. You know, just in case my fill-a-pix is eaten by beetles or flips upside down or the sound files are changed to farty noises...

Our puzzles in the Play Online section are universal and eternal: once published, they are there for posterity for all time and for all users around the world (many of which are not familiar with "April fool"). Our users go to previous weeks all the time (or filter puzzles according to categories) and there's no way they will realize a puzzle is from April Fool's week. So this idea won't work for us.

BTW, the changes you mention are far from trivial. What you casually suggest will take months to develop, will cost a fortune, will shift our focus, and will not increase our business (probably the opposite, with the confusions it will cost). On the other hand, if any of our puzzle fans wants to manually construct a set of April Fool puzzles and write a short story about them then we will gladly publish them on our website in the Articles section.